Major New Plot Details About the Next ‘Fantastic Beasts’ Movie Are Here

Accio plot details! As the second installment of the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them series begins shooting, Warner Brothers has finally revealed more info about the movie’s storyline and cast—and you can color us intrigued.

The new series is set in the wizarding world 70 years before the events of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Although we already knew that Jude Law had been tapped for the role of Albus Dumbledore, the studio has now confirmed to multiple sources that the next film will see Dumbledore and his former Hogwarts student Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) team up to battle the genocidal wizard Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp). If you saw the first Fantastic Beasts, you’ll remember that film ended with Scamander temporarily defeating Grindelwald in New York City. And if you read the Harry Potter book series closely, you’ll also remember that Albus and Grindelwald were definitely into each other before the latter went all ethno-cleanse-crazy, so it’s safe to say this battle is going to be major for all of the characters involved.

(Now, as to the obvious question: Is this really going to be a franchise where Newt and his friends just battle the same guy year after year? It definitely seems to be. But that’s what Harry Potter was too!)

According to Deadline, in addition to Depp and Redmayne, returning Fantastic Beasts cast members include Katherine Waterson and Alison Sudol as witch sisters Tina and Queen, plus Dan Fogler as Jacob, a muggle whose memory was wiped at the end of the first film—so we’ll see how he finds himself in the wizarding world once more. Also appearing will be Ezra Miller, who played the disturbed and powerful Credence, and Zoë Kravitz, who we saw only in a picture but know from expository dialogue is Leta Lestrange, a Hogwarts student and Newt’s would-be paramour.

The new major cast members and characters are, per Deadline:

“Claudia Kim (The Dark Tower, Avengers: Age Of Ultron, Marco Polo) as a young woman first encountered as a featured attraction at a wizarding circus. William Nadylam will play a wizard named Yusuf Kama; Ingvar Sigurdsson (Baltasar Kormakur’s The Oath) joins as bounty hunter Grimmson; Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (The Missing) is Skender, who runs the wizarding circus; and Kevin Guthrie is Abernathy, the boss of MACUSA (Magical Congress of the USA)…and Callum Turner as Theseus Scamander, a war hero and Auror, who is also Newt’s older brother.”

So: magical circus, teaming up with Dumbledore, getting the gang back together, and hunting evil wizards. Got all that so far? We also know that the film, set a few months after the 1927 events of the first Fantastic Beasts, will take place in London and Paris, and will include references to more of the known Harry Potter world, which we have to assume means…Hogwarts, right? Are we going back to Hogwarts?

Please, please can we go back to Hogwarts and see what it looked like in the twenties? No offense to Fantastic Beasts, a perfectly fun film in and of itself, but it didn’t feel of a piece with the other Harry Potter stories because they never went to Hogwarts. That’s the audience’s buy-in to the wizarding world. Yes, friendship and love and evil and adventure are all perfectly relatable story elements, but the original stories captured the imagination because the central daily action of the main characters— going to school—was something we understood and experienced ourselves.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 2 (note: not the official title, just what we’re calling it until they tell us the title) will be in theaters November 16, 2018.

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